Knowledge and Mind: Philosophical Essays

These twelve essays were published to honor Norman Malcolm on his seventy-second birthday. Malcolm, who taught at Cornell from 1948 to 1978, has been a notable presence in contemporary analytic philosophy, valued not only for his own strong voice but also because his work has extended the influence of his two great teachers at Cambridge, G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The essays in this Festschrift canvass topics in the philosophy of mind and in epistemology; and, as one would expect from admirers of Malcolm, they are written carefully, clearly, and with admirable attention to argument. If, however, Thomas Nagel is right to say that Malcolm's most significant influence on his students was a sense that "philosophical perplexity is our most important resource; that the greatest danger in philosophy is to lose the sense of what is really puzzling and so to become susceptible to answers that leave the real problems untouched", then several of these essays fall short of Malcolm's ideal. For all their lucidity and their workmanlike progress from point to point, they leave the reader with no great appreciation for the depth--what Wittgenstein called the Pathos--of philosophical problems.